“The Two Vaults,” a poem Walt Whitman (1819–92) began drafting in one of his notebooks sometime in 1861 or 1862, opens onto a fetching scene: “The vault at Pfaff's where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse / While on the walk immediately overhead, pass the myriad feet of Broadway” (The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York UP, 1984]: 454–55). Unfinished and unpublished in Whitman's lifetime, “The Two Vaults” celebrates Pfaff's beer cellar, the mid-nineteenth-century destination for New York's bohemian set. Countless clandestine bars and nightclubs since the 1860s have reproduced the scene described in Whitman's lines—the privileged access to sensual and social delights just beyond (or below, in this case) the hustle of everyday urban life and its reduction of individuals to moving parts. Pfaff's beer cellar was the place in nineteenth-century...
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